Lecture
The dissolution of the primitive communal mode of production also marks the transition from the archaic (pre-economic) social formation to the economic social formation. The economic social formation is characterized by the separation of production relations from social relations in general, and by the complex differentiation of the former. Within the economic social formation, production relations ultimately acquire the role of the determining social relations.
Together with the change in the goals of economic activity — the shift from survival and self-reproduction of communal collectives to the private acquisition of material wealth — production relations acquire the character of economic relations. Economic relations are those production relations bound up with the pursuit of the most efficient acquisition of material wealth, that is, with increasing the size of that wealth while relatively reducing the costs of acquiring it.
With the formation of the state comes the formation of the political and legal superstructure — the totality of people's political and legal relations. A relationship is established between the economic base (the system of production relations) and the social superstructure, in which the base plays the determining role with respect to the superstructure. Alongside the development of exploitation, the division of society into classes and class inequality develop as well. The exploitation of the laboring majority by a minority of the population (the ruling classes) is the mechanism by which economic and social progress of humanity is achieved within the economic social formation. On the one hand, exploitation allows economic resources to be concentrated in the hands of the ruling classes, enabling representatives of those classes to specialize in intellectual labor and to create the conditions for the development of science, education, and culture. On the other hand, exploitation, as compulsion to labor imposed on the exploited majority, ensures the extraction of surplus labor from that majority as the material basis of progress. Thus, within certain historical bounds, Marxism recognizes exploitation as an objectively necessary economic phenomenon. Nevertheless, Marxism also recognizes as progressive (and no less objective) the struggle to overcome those conditions under which humanity can develop only at the cost of the oppression of some social groups by others.
The name "Asiatic mode of production" does not imply a strict geographical attachment to Asia specifically. It is simply that this mode of production was initially studied on the example of Asiatic despotisms. However, societies of this type were found not only in Asia, but also in Africa, in Central and South America, and in Europe (for example, the Khazar Khaganate; even in ancient Greece the socio-economic structure of Sparta carried a number of features bringing it close to the Asiatic mode of production). The name "ancient mode of production" traces back to the Latin word antiquitas (meaning antiquity, olden times). The word "ancient" came to be used to designate ancient Greece and ancient Rome, and it was the study of the socio-economic order of these societies that gave rise to the concept of the ancient mode of production. These two modes of production formed historically at almost the same time (the ancient mode of production is established somewhat later than the Asiatic one), on the basis of roughly the same level of development of the productive forces. There is a certain difficulty in distinguishing between the late stages of the evolution of early class societies and the early stages of the formation of both the Asiatic and the ancient modes of production (later it will become clear that the same difficulty applies to the early stages of feudalism as well). One of the main "diagnostic signs" here is the completion of the formation of the state, which testifies to a sufficiently deep class stratification of society and the acuteness of class contradictions. The state arises as an apparatus of administration and an apparatus of coercion, separated from the rest of society (that is, state service acquires, on the one hand, a professional character, and on the other hand, all other members of society are excluded from it, unlike a system of self-government, and partly unlike military democracy as well). Thus, for example, an elected and replaceable military chief turns into a non-replaceable hereditary king (monarch). The state organization breaks with the clan principle of organizing society and replaces it with a territorial one. At first the upper stratum of the state apparatus largely coincides with the upper stratum of the clan-tribal nobility.
However, quite quickly a transition occurs to filling the highest state offices according to property-class and, in part, professional criteria, rather than clan criteria (the successful struggle of the wealthy plebeians for equality with the patricians, the advancement of "strong commoners" in ancient Egypt, the transformation of the words "rich man" into a title in ancient Maya society, the admission of free commoners to official posts in ancient Egypt and China). The formation of economic inequality occurring in early class society, together with the development of private production and private accumulation, as well as the consolidation of a clan nobility that seizes a monopoly on power-related (and, along with this, redistributive) and ideological (priestly) functions, becomes the precondition for the emergence of class division.
Alongside inequality in the production, appropriation, and redistribution of the surplus product, inequality in the ownership of the principal means of production — land, and later slaves — also takes shape. But these processes initially develop (at the stage of the Copper Age, and in some places even the Late Stone Age) only where there are sufficient preconditions for the further growth of the productive forces — mainly in subtropical regions and those close to them. In territories where the productive forces are either insufficient at a given stage of development to produce a surplus product (the temperate zone, the North, tropical forests, semi-desert), or fail to create incentives for increasing labor productivity (an abundance of natural resources for hunting, fishing, and gathering, as in some regions of Oceania), the transition to class society is delayed, or does not occur at all. With the growth of economic inequality (whether created by private accumulation, taking the form of property inequality, or by monopoly over communal functions, taking the form of inequality in access to communal funds), relations of dependency arise among formerly equal members of the community. Former mutual aid is gradually displaced by usurious debt-bondage transactions. Property and land allotments are seized for debts. The rich and noble also appropriate as private property certain communal lands, as well as lands acquired through external expansion. The cultivation of these lands is no longer carried out by the labor of the new owners themselves, but by people dependent on them — slaves, landless community members turned tenants, community members working off debts, ruined community members and outcasts working for hire. Between these categories of the population, which already have different socio-class status, there is a clash of economic interests, and sharp social conflicts flare up. The state, as a public authority separate from the people, is called upon:
first, to secure for the rich and noble their dominant position in society, to consolidate their privileged social status with the help of legal norms and organized coercion (relying on armed force); second, to smooth over social conflicts, to limit and "rationalize" the exploitative ambitions of the ruling classes, so that the excessive greed of individual representatives of the ruling class does not give rise to a real threat to the survival of society, and thereby to the entire system of class domination. Marxism on the relationship between political genesis and private property: In Soviet historical scholarship of the 1980s, views became current and then widely disseminated according to which Marxism regards the emergence of the state and class division only as a direct result of the emergence of private property and the property inequality based on it. Such an approach rests on a double vulgarization of Marxism — first the vulgarization of classical Marxism in Stalinized "Marxism-Leninism," and then the further primitivization of this latter doctrine in the educational courses that many Soviet historians "went through" (without troubling themselves to study genuine Marxism). Their entirely understandable indignation at the primitive-dogmatic concept they had absorbed was directed, however, not at those who had imposed this concept on them, nor at their own laziness, but at classical Marxism itself. Even in F. Engels's work "The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State," where political genesis (the formation of the state) and class formation are considered only on the example of Antiquity, it is not claimed that the state was merely a consequence of private property and the class stratification based on it. On the contrary, he treats the state as an instrument by means of which the already-begun process of the formation of private property and property inequality was accelerated and consolidated. If one turns to Marx's own treatment of this question, his analysis of the Asiatic form of property clearly shows that economic inequality in it is based not on the accumulation of private property (which does not receive significant development in the Asiatic community), but on the opposition between rank-and-file community members and the nobility, in which the unifying principle of the community, or of a group of communities, is embodied. The nobility, by virtue of this, claims the right to dispose of the community's surplus product for certain common needs and purposes (irrigation, war, temple construction...), and in the end the surplus product becomes concentrated in the hands of the despot and his satraps. So that social conflicts would not bury class society itself under their rubble, the state, already at an early stage in the history of exploitative societies, takes measures to limit exploitation.
See: Engels F. The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State // Marx K. and Engels F. Works, 2nd ed., vol. 21, p. 108. See: Marx K. Economic Manuscripts of 1857-1859. Forms Preceding Capitalist Production // Marx K. and Engels F. Works, 2nd ed., vol. 46, part I, pp. 463-464.
This limitation does not eliminate exploitation and applies only to the families of full-fledged community members, who form the ethnic core of the state and supply soldiers for the army. Typically a ban was introduced (or a time limit imposed) on the enslavement of full-fledged community members for debt, the inviolability of communal allotments was declared, sometimes a maximum on private landholding was set, and cancellation (annulment) of debts was carried out. Reforms of this kind are characteristic of societies developing along the path of both the ancient and the Asiatic modes of production (the reforms of Pericles in Athens, the reforms of Servius Tullius in Rome, the reforms of Urukagina in Lagash, the limitation of the terms of debt slavery and the inalienable character of soldiers' land property under the Code of Hammurabi in Babylon, etc.). In general, at the early (early-class) stage of their development, societies that later move on to the ancient and Asiatic modes of production are quite similar. Early Asiatic city-states (in Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley, in Yin-dynasty China) have their ancient counterparts (the city-states of the Cretan-Mycenaean period), as well as African (early Egyptian nomes, the Yoruba city-states) and Mesoamerican (the city-states of the Aztecs and Maya) analogues. Large-scale private landholding is weakly developed at the initial stage in both cases.
The use of slave labor is quite limited in scale. The state (the king) does not act as the supreme owner of the land, but neither is there a strict delineation of the rights of the king, the communities, and private owners to dispose of land plots. By his decrees the ruler can allot plots from communal lands for private (service) use, or plots whose harvest is directed toward providing for public works. However, already at an early stage certain differences begin to appear. Farming family households in the ancient polis are practically independent in terms of production. In the Asiatic city-state (Harappa in the Indus Valley, Ur in Mesopotamia, Men-nefer and Waset in the Nile Valley) the farmer depends on an irrigation system organized not by a single household, or even by a single settlement. Or else there is some other production necessity uniting the work of a whole series of communities (for example, the joint defense and expansion of territory. Men-nefer and Waset are the Egyptian names of the cities more familiar to us under their Greek names, Memphis and Thebes.
for transhumant or nomadic pastoralism among pastoral societies). An intermediate position is occupied by the degree of independence of family households in the Maya city-states: on the one hand, slash-and-burn agriculture for cultivating maize (the milpa system) requires joint communal work on the corresponding plots. On the other hand, the scale of this work, as in terraced agriculture and in the system of "raised fields" ("elevated fields"), does not go beyond the bounds of small rural communities. Since the Maya, before the Spanish conquest, never surpassed this level of economic development, it is impossible to establish firmly whether the further evolution of the early-class Maya city-states would have followed the ancient or the Asiatic variant (as happened with the Aztecs, or with the Quechua in the Inca state). In the Asiatic city-states, significant temple and royal estates based on slave labor form already at an early stage, something almost absent in the ancient poleis. In Asiatic society the degree of state centralization and of the separation of the state from society is higher from the outset.
Rank-and-file community members, and even that part of the privileged strata that does not belong to the richest and most noble, lose all political rights already at an early stage and can count at best on a purely executive role as a minor or middle-ranking official. Although even a rank-and-file scribe in Asiatic society stands immeasurably higher than a rank-and-file community member, he stands outside the making of policy. In the ancient polis, even under a monarchical form of government, various forms of participation by ordinary citizens (a concept itself foreign to Asiatic society) in deciding matters of state are preserved — through the popular assembly, even if quite curtailed in its functions, through the election of certain officials, or, at the very least, through legally established forms of participation by the nobility in deciding matters of state (the Roman Senate, the Athenian Areopagus, similar forms of representation of the nobility in Carthage — the Council of Ten, the Council of 104 — and in Sparta).
The weakness of the productive forces of early class societies determined the fact that far from all of them made the transition to the ancient or Asiatic mode of production (and in some of them, in the following historical epoch, feudal society did not even take shape, at least not to any sufficient degree). The relative weakness of the productive forces also explains, to some extent, the wide prevalence of the need to maintain the functioning of family farming households on the basis of the joint efforts of a whole series of communities. Although collective irrigation did provide societies of the Asiatic type with a significant initial leap in the level of development of the productive forces, it ultimately provoked the formation of factors constraining further such development. Only in a comparatively limited territory, where, given the existing level of productive forces, it turned out to be possible to effectively run relatively small (family) independent farming households (most of the Mediterranean — Greece, Rome, Carthage, Phoenicia and their colonies on the Iberian and Apennine peninsulas, on the Mediterranean islands, in the Black Sea region, in Asia Minor, on the coast of North Africa), did the ancient mode of production develop. Ancient Japanese society displays a certain typological affinity to the ancient mode of production. Ancient and Asiatic societies are characterized by such a specific feature as a fundamental multiplicity of economic modes (multi-sector character).
Multi-sector character (mnogoukladnost) is the combination, within a single mode of production, of systems of production relations that differ qualitatively from one another, forming independent (that is, having a relatively complete cycle of reproduction of the product and of social relations) economic sectors. In transitional societies, multi-sector character appears as the combination, within a single national economy, of sectors resting on different modes of production.
In the modern era, multi-sector character usually appears as a sign of a transitional society. The Asiatic and ancient modes of production were composed of heterogeneous sectors interacting with one another. One of the differences between the Asiatic and ancient modes of production lies in the different significance and relative weight of the various sectors.
Among these sectors were:
Another characteristic feature of the Asiatic and ancient modes of production (as of pre-capitalist modes of production in general) is that their social structure takes shape in the form of estates (sosloviya). The social structure of these societies undoubtedly had a class character, but these classes, on the surface of social relations, including in their legal forms, appeared as estates. Estates are a form in which the class division of society is expressed under pre-capitalist modes of production. Estate groups were characterized by different legal status, were typically hereditary and relatively closed. The division into estates could be quite close to the actual class division, or it might not coincide with it, splitting one or another class into different estates, or combining different classes within a single estate. Within estates, subgroups with different legal status were often distinguished (onto which a division by occupational, ethnic, religious, and other criteria could also be superimposed). The most rigid form of estate division is the caste system, which absolutely forbade passage from one estate (caste) to another. The existence of estate forms of the class division of society was determined above all by the fact that relations of exploitation in pre-capitalist modes of production were built on extra-economic compulsion to perform surplus labor. It was precisely for this reason that open legal fixation of class inequality was necessary. Most clearly fixed was the unequal status of slaves, who, for example in ancient society, stood entirely outside the official estate structure. Nevertheless, through negative legal norms (prohibitions — a ban on independently concluding transactions, on owning property, on appearing in court even as a witness, etc.) their legal status was defined in close correspondence to their actual socio-economic position. Over time, estate status could become sharply detached from a person's actual socio-economic position. For example, in some Asiatic despotisms, persons who by estate status were slaves could hold the posts of ministers and even chief viziers.
The high degree of state centralization in Asiatic society is closely connected with the need to ensure joint efforts (on the scale of extensive territories) for creating the necessary conditions for conducting agricultural work. The corresponding activity of individual family households and communities is coordinated on a local and on a nationwide scale. Of course, this activity does not necessarily cover all cultivated lands. But once the need for supra-communal coordination of economic work arises, the corresponding relations become fixed and come to dominate the entire territory of the given state. In addition, societies of the Asiatic type are generally characterized by the use of manual technologies in agriculture, and by the widespread, strictly time-coordinated mass application of labor (for example, in the technology of cultivating rice fields). The significant role of joint efforts determines the low degree of dissolution of the primitive neighborhood community. Moreover, the nobility, rightly regarding the community as a necessary instrument for the functioning of agricultural production and, at the same time, as a fiscal mechanism, to a certain extent protects it from dissolution (guarantee of the allotment, ban on enslaving a community member). This, however, does not exclude the application of harsh measures of coercion and even arbitrary violence, both toward individual community members and toward entire communities (collective liability in the payment of taxes, forced resettlement, being driven to mass labor).
In the Asiatic community, land belongs to the community itself, but the community acts in this capacity only as a representative of some supreme unifying principle (the sovereign or a god, and these two figures may interpenetrate each other). The individual is dissolved within the community, receiving an allotment from it only for personal use. This character of the Asiatic community brings it close to the primitive neighborhood community, gives the Asiatic mode of production archaic features, and facilitates the superimposition of Asiatic despotism over the primitive communities of conquered peoples that are at a pre-class and pre-state stage. Features of the Asiatic community: The Asiatic community is quite resistant to the corrosive influence of relations of personal dependence — slavery, usury, debt-bondage transactions, and so on — because these, in general, do not contradict the character of relations within the community. The Asiatic community member is "by definition" dependent on the community, and through it, on the sovereign's satraps and the despot himself. Stratification within the community, the emergence of impoverished strata turning into tenants and debtors of the noble and wealthy elite of society, does not lead to the disintegration of the community itself. The corrosive effect of these relations manifests itself when it leads to the mass loss of land by community members, or to a change in the "vector" of dependence — dependence on the monarch and the nobility, as representatives of the state, turns into private dependence. In societies of the Asiatic type, the economic strengthening of the nobility occurs (at least initially) mainly not through the usurpation of communal lands and the private exploitation of community members.
The nobility exploits community members through the system of the nationwide hierarchy. A post in the state apparatus gives a member of the nobility the right to receive a portion of the income (rent-tax) from the territory under his jurisdiction. Lands (villages) may be allotted to an official, the income from which goes entirely toward his upkeep. Belonging to the nobility in fact coincides with holding a post in the state apparatus, and without this latter condition noble status is easily lost (although, of course, origin from the nobility does give actual advantages in obtaining posts). Since the distribution of posts lies in the hands of the monarch (the despot), he and the narrow elite of the nobility surrounding him (the court) acquire exceptional political weight. Under such conditions the development of private landholding is objectively limited, and this deprives the ruling class of economic independence from the sovereign. (Asiatic despotism is often characterized as a society of "universal slavery," meaning by this the considerable degree of lack of rights of all social groups). Moreover, since under these conditions the despot, both in fact and in law, acts as the central figure embodying the system of communal ownership of land, private landholdings, including those of the noble elite, have a very weak legal guarantee. Asiatic despotism should not be regarded as a completely monolithic system, based only on redistribution (reallocation) of the product produced by the communities through the system of state hierarchy. Although this system of relations was dominant, private property and the relations based on it, including private accumulation and the inheritance of property, were noticeably widespread (not only in crafts and trade, but also in agriculture). In connection with this, there was also a growth of the privately dependent population (tenants, debtors, and those in debt bondage).
However, relations of private economic exploitation were subordinate in character compared to the fundamental relations, based on the redistribution of the surplus product and part of the necessary product through the system of state power. In general, Asiatic despotism is characterized by a low degree of security for private property, and this applies not only to landholding. Crafts and trade were strictly regulated, sometimes subjected to quite severe restrictions (there is even a known example of a conspiracy against a Chinese emperor by merchants dissatisfied with such restrictions). However, despite this, the level of development of urban crafts and trade is quite high. The considerable concentration of income in the hands of the sovereign and the ruling elite leads to the emergence, earlier than in the ancient world, of large cities with a developed state administration, crafts, and trade. The high concentration of demand (on the part of the nobility) ensures the profitability of developing highly specialized crafts. It is no accident that ancient historians ranked the craft products of the East above the craft products of the ancient world. This same concentration of demand also ensured the profitability of trading expeditions for exotic goods.
In addition, the centralized Asiatic despotism, as a rule, took care (for military reasons) of the condition of the communication routes on its territory. The large concentration of nobility, service personnel, and trading and craft populations in cities also created a broad market for agricultural products. However, only suburban households entered the market to any significant extent. For the rest, the need for money was minimal — taxes were collected in kind, and payment was likewise made in kind to village blacksmiths, potters, weavers, and shoemakers. Owing to the underdevelopment of private property and of a commodity economy in the countryside, productive private slaveholding is also not widespread. Slaves may belong both to members of the ruling class and to well-off rank-and-file community members, and to communities as such. But their economic significance is small. They are either servants or laborers performing the heaviest, non-productive functions, which is characteristic of the system of patriarchal slavery. The exception is royal and temple lands, where the productive labor of slaves was applied on a large scale.
One of the few opportunities for the expansion of private landholding in Asiatic despotism is external conquest. It also serves as a channel for easing the contradictions connected with agrarian overpopulation (a shortage of arable land amid growth of the farming population, which leads to the fragmentation of allotments, a fall in income from a single allotment, and growth in the mass of the lumpenized population). The drive toward external expansion also has a more fundamental cause, rooted in the very foundations of the Asiatic mode of production. The stagnant character of the development of the productive forces leaves the ruling class only one way to increase the mass of appropriated surplus product — increasing the number of tax-paying population and the area of cultivated land. After all, growth in labor productivity occurs extremely slowly, almost imperceptibly, while an increase in the rate of exploitation quickly runs up against absolute limits. One can, of course, flay three hides, or even seven, but this will soon lead to the disappearance of the object of exploitation itself. That is why Asiatic despotisms are characterized by a drive toward constant external expansion.
The role of external expansion in the Asiatic mode of production: Certain exceptions include the despotisms of Ancient and Medieval China. Having settled the territory of present-day China, they subsequently almost never resorted to external expansion, for the simple reason that the neighboring territories (the Gobi Desert, the taiga of southern Siberia, Tibet, the mountainous jungles of Indochina) did not have any significant expanses of land ready for agriculture. External expansion is more easily carried out with respect to peoples at a pre-state stage of development. However, there is often no other way but to direct this expansion against similar neighboring Asiatic despotisms. In such cases mutual struggle can continue with varying success for hundreds of years. The Asiatic despotisms themselves quite often become objects of expansion by early class societies, predominantly nomadic ones. The particular features of the socio-economic structure of the latter (every man a mounted warrior) give them a massive, mobile army. Cases of effective conquests carried out by nomadic tribes are fairly frequent.
However, the empires they create usually do not last long. Heterogeneous in economic terms, multi-tribal, spread over vast expanses (the Hittite empire, the Khazar Khaganate, the empire of Genghis Khan, the empire of Timur), they disintegrate within historically short periods. Another outcome is also possible — having encountered the regular army of a large agricultural state, the nomads gradually exhaust their strength in raids, weaken, and retreat (the Huns and the Chinese empire, the Khazars and Rus'). The drive of the nobility of Asiatic society toward external expansion had far-reaching consequences. In case of success, enormous empires could form. However, constant external expansion exhausted the strength of the indigenous agricultural population, which was the main supplier of soldiers. Wars required expenditures, and additional levies likewise fell on rank-and-file community members. The deterioration of the economic position of family households drew them into various kinds of debt-bondage and usurious transactions. Over time, contrary to the accepted legal norms, private landholding by the nobility grows at the expense of communal lands and the allotments of rank-and-file community members, some of whom turn into tenants under conditions of debt bondage, or even into slaves. The private estates of the nobility grow on newly conquered lands. If, in the initial period of the formation of empires, the degree of exploitation of the indigenous agricultural population was not as great as the degree of exploitation of conquered peoples, the processes described above lead to a convergence of their positions. Such an evolution of Asiatic society has twofold consequences.
First, the mass social base of Asiatic despotism, in the form of the rank-and-file community members belonging to the indigenous ethnic core, weakens. Their relatively privileged status (guarantee of an allotment, guarantee against enslavement, taxes fixed at a lower level than for conquered peoples, privileges connected with military or state service) erodes. The army recruited from their ranks becomes less reliable. In addition, the growth in the size of the empire no longer makes it possible to manage with an "ethnically pure" army. It becomes multi-tribal, which also reduces its resilience and manageability. Second, the growth of private landholding by the nobility also leads to the growth of its economic independence from the sovereign. The rulers of individual territories (which had earlier often been independent state or semi-state formations — for example, the nomes of ancient Egypt, or the city-states of Mesopotamia) begin to claim an independent political role. This is facilitated by the difficulty of maintaining a unified centralized administration as empires of the Asiatic type grow in scale. The growth of tendencies toward territorial and economic fragmentation leads to a build-up of internal contradictions and weakens the state.
At best, it goes through a series of social conflicts (internecine strife, peasant and slave uprisings, sometimes successful ones), which usually ends with a change of the ruling dynasty and of most of the noble elite. The new dynasty restores the initial conditions for the development of Asiatic society (reducing the nobility's income to that derived from office, reaffirming the guaranteed economic status of the peasant community members). Such a course of events can be traced in examples from the history of ancient Egypt and China. However, quite often the weakening of the state leads to its downfall as a result of external conquest. Such a conquest, however, has consequences similar to the previous scenario. There is a restoration of the initial conditions for the development of the Asiatic mode of production, although in the case of conquest the ethnic core of the state changes — the ethnic composition changes both of the ruling class and of that part of the peasant commune that has guaranteed economic status. These positions are now occupied by representatives of the conquering people. On the same territory, events of this kind can be repeated several times. This feature of the historical development of countries with the Asiatic mode of production has come to be called the "Asiatic cycle." Why, then, does the build-up of internal contradictions in the Asiatic mode of production not lead to social revolution and a transition to a new mode of production, but instead results in development of a cyclical type? Because the most important precondition for social revolution is absent — the rise of society's productive forces to a new level and the consequent sharpening of contradictions between the productive forces and the production relations.
On the combination of economic and archaic features in the Asiatic mode of production: There are grounds for the assertion that the stagnant character of despotism of the Asiatic type is connected with the fact that its main economic foundation — the sector formed by the system of neighborhood communities — was inherited from the archaic social formation, and that the type of Asiatic community resembles the primitive neighborhood community, and that therefore the Asiatic mode of production itself can only with great reservation be classified as part of the economic social formation.
After all, properly economic forms of running the economy here appear only as a small superstructure over archaic communities. But these archaic elements are combined with the presence of an extensive system of state power; the social structure of the Asiatic community differs from the structure of the primitive community; and Asiatic despotism is characterized by socio-class stratification of society and systematic exploitation — all of which does not allow Asiatic despotism to be placed in the same typological series as pre-economic (archaic) societies. The exploitative character of the Asiatic mode of production makes the economic character (that is, oriented toward the appropriation of wealth) of production relations dominant in this society, and this is what determines the inclusion of the Asiatic mode of production within the bounds of the economic social formation. For these reasons there are insufficient grounds for classifying Asiatic despotism itself as belonging to the archaic social formation, and therefore for abandoning the concept of the Asiatic mode of production. Nevertheless, one should not ignore the fundamental contradiction between the economic character of the relations between the nobility and the peasant commune, and the almost entirely archaic character of the production relations within the communal economic system.
This contradiction, over the long historical perspective, determined the peculiarities of the historical evolution of societies of the Asiatic type, the overwhelming majority of which never entered the capitalist era through internal sources of development. Ultimately, Asiatic society too is capable of undergoing social revolution (though far from always as a result of the development of internal contradictions). Although the economic development of the Asiatic community has a rather stagnant character, and private economic initiative is significantly limited, the evolution of the productive forces does occur even in such a society. Over time, on this basis, the effective functioning of local economic communities (estates) becomes possible. The possibility of conducting agriculture based on a large-scale irrigation network may disappear or be significantly reduced (for example, because of climatic shifts, including man-made ones). A splitting-off from large despotisms (empires) of territories that have no need to rely on a nationwide irrigation network may occur. This creates the economic possibility for turning official land allotments into hereditary landholding, and for the associated private subjugation of peasant community members, between whom and private landowners relations of serf and lord arise. Such hereditary landholding is not, however, full private property, and is sanctioned by the state hierarchy. Between state officials of different levels who acquire the status of independent landowners, relations of suzerain and vassal are established. Feudal relations take shape. The qualitative transition from the Asiatic mode of production to the feudal one under conditions of Asiatic society is usually drawn out over time and rarely has a pronounced, abrupt character. Very often feudalization in Asiatic society is accompanied by the preservation of many features of Asiatic despotism.
The formation of the ancient (classical) mode of production is linked to the possibility of relatively independent family farming that generates a surplus product. As in the Asiatic mode of production, its functioning is problematic without the persisting traditions of communal mutual aid and without reliance on a fund of communal lands (forests, hayfields, pastures...). However, family farming can quite readily develop without the additional economic conditions controlled by the state (for example, state-organized irrigation works). The ancient (classical) community appears as a union of private owners (and in this lies its fundamental difference from the Asiatic community, which ultimately determines the different historical fate of ancient and Asiatic society). This union is something distinct from the owners themselves, existing in the form of the ancient polis. In the ancient community the communal land (the ager publicus of the ancient Romans) is clearly separated from the private plots of community members. The ancient city-state is a form of union of landowners (whereas the Asiatic city is the sovereign's camp or the seat of the supreme despot's leading satraps, resting on the forced consolidation of rural communities into an urban settlement). Yet even in ancient society a landowner is such only as a member of the community. As in the Asiatic community, ancient peasant-community members hand over their surplus labor to the state — however, this surplus labor is not a source of income for the entire exploiting class, but is intended only to maintain the state apparatus (which, unlike the Asiatic despotism, does not direct the economic activity of the communities), primarily to support the army.
Therefore, part of the community members — well-off peasants and artisans — gain the ability to accumulate a certain share of the surplus product in their own hands. The ancient community rests on a higher level of social division of labor — in ancient society, craft production is concentrated to a greater extent in the city as opposed to the countryside. Agricultural technologies themselves involve the use of a more complex system of means of production than in "Asiatic" societies. Such conditions arose in the Ancient World mainly in the regions of the Northern and Eastern Mediterranean and certain adjacent areas. This does not mean that there were no territories in Asia, Africa, or America allowing for a similar independent family or private economy. However, there, as a rule, systematic mass-scale production of surplus product during that period was possible mainly in territories requiring significant works organized over a vast area with state participation. Therefore the dominant socio-economic relations there developed along the lines of the Asiatic mode of production. The state in ancient society bears limited economic functions (tax collection and resource provision for the operation of the state apparatus, organization of the army, maintenance of the road network, minting of coin, judicial and police functions, legal regulation of economic activity, support of the state cult). The very size of the ancient city-states is usually smaller than that of the Asiatic despotisms (although at an early stage both represent city-states). In ancient society private landed property develops rapidly. The plots of community members begin to be alienated for debt, since a loan in money or in kind was often given against the pledge of a land plot. This phenomenon came to be called mortgage (hypothec). Since the process of dispossessing community members of their land leads to the erosion of the mass social base of the ancient polis, the state at a certain stage takes measures to limit this process, as well as to limit the debt bondage of community members. However, despite these restrictions, in ancient society the significance of private economy is greater than in the Asiatic one. Accordingly, the expansion of large private landholding takes more intensive forms here. The entire history of ancient societies is permeated by the struggle between small private-communal and large private landholding. One of the ways of resolving the contradiction between small and large landholding, as well as of relieving the problems of agrarian overpopulation, is (as is also the case in Asiatic despotism) external expansion.
A less acute form of such expansion is colonization (the founding of new colony-poleis by Greek or Phoenician city-states on relatively unsettled lands). A more acute form of external expansion is the formation of empires (the empire of Alexander the Great and the Hellenistic states created on its basis, the Roman Empire). But even within the territories of the ethnic core of the ancient states there occurs a marked development of large private landholding. The working of such private landed estates is carried out by the labor of slaves or dependent peasants. Since the possibilities of enslaving free community members are limited, the dynamics of slave-labor resources acquire quite substantial importance for large-scale ancient private landholding. Slavery in the ancient polis largely loses its patriarchal character. Slaves in large private estates now perform not auxiliary but principal economic functions, which also leads to increased intensity of their exploitation. The relatively low efficiency of slave labor, owing to the slaves' lack of interest in the work — expressed in careless or deliberately poor treatment of draft animals, damage to tools, and so on — leads to the development of harsh extra-economic coercion, matched by the rightless status of slaves (a "speaking tool"). The slave trade, as a channel for bringing slaves captured in predatory wars into private estates, assumes broad proportions. Debt bondage of fellow citizens also exists, but laws and customs strive to give it a limited character. Although large (as well as small) private estates were mostly of a subsistence (natural-economy) character, oriented toward self-sufficiency, the needs of the ruling class could not be satisfied by subsistence farming alone. The need for money leads to the creation, on private landed estates, of specialized branches oriented toward urban markets or foreign trade.
Such were the ancient Roman villas and most of the slaveholding estates of ancient Athens. Craft enterprises using slave labor (to whom, as a rule, only the most primitive operations were entrusted) were market-oriented from the very outset. Commodity production and trade in ancient society (as in the Asiatic one) were concentrated around cities. Trade was subject to regulation, though not as rigid and arbitrary as in the Asiatic despotisms. The rights of merchants were guaranteed, but there was a difference in the level of legal (and not merely actual) guarantees for compatriots and for foreigners. Trade mainly involved the non-agricultural part of the urban population, large landowners, and, to some extent, the suburban farms of peasant-community members. The role of trade and commodity production in the ancient world is somewhat greater than in the "Asiatic" one. Since peasant and craft economy in the ancient world is more independent (and can often retain part of the surplus product in its own hands), peasants and artisans turn to the market more often and make less use of natural exchange within communities. A fairly high degree of guarantee of private property rights and private accumulation, together with lesser constraints on trade, also contributed to a wider spread of trading operations beyond local markets. The presence of a mass of small independent peasant, craft, and trading enterprises, and the personal freedom of the persons employed in them (as opposed to the principle of "universal slavery" in Asiatic despotism), creates in ancient society the socio-economic preconditions for political democracy. A transition from the despotic form of government characteristic of early class society to a democratic state often occurs. If the Asiatic peasant or artisan is merely a subject, the ancient one is a citizen. However, with the growing importance of large private landholding, and with the formation of a prosperous trading-and-usurious upper stratum, ancient democracy is gradually displaced by an aristocratic or oligarchic form of government, and later by monarchy, which nevertheless retains some democratic attributes.
The struggle between large and small landholding, together with external expansion, drives the evolution of ancient society. External expansion initially eases the pressure of agrarian overpopulation, provides land allotments for soldiers (veterans or soldier-settlers), and creates an influx of slaves that sustains intensive slaveholding economy. Under conditions of a constant influx of fresh contingents of slaves, they can be exploited "to the point of exhaustion," with not only the entire surplus product they produce but also part of the necessary product being appropriated. However, the contradictions noted above then begin to intensify (some of which were outlined using the example of Asiatic despotism). In part these contradictions are connected with the limits of external expansion, which was first demonstrated by the rapid fragmentation of Alexander the Great's empire, and then by the historically rather short-lived existence of most of its fragments — the large Hellenistic states. Attempts to synthesize local Asiatic and imported ancient (Greek) orders ultimately failed, not only because of the objective significance of local economic conditions, but also because of the limited human resources of ancient colonization of the corresponding territories. In fact this led not so much to the Hellenization of the East as to the "barbarization" of the Hellenistic states. If for ancient Phoenicia, Carthage, Athens, Macedon, Epirus, and Rome external expansion directed at the barbarian periphery was a necessary way of resolving internal contradictions, it nevertheless ran up against certain limits. Expansion enlarged the conquered territory, which had to be controlled by military force, and increased the length of the border in contact with hostile barbarian tribes and states. This required building up military contingents, exhausting the strength of the core nationality.
In parallel with this, a creeping expansion of private landholding took place within the metropole at the expense of communal lands and the private plots of free community members. For a time a struggle went on between democratic and oligarchic projects for resolving these contradictions. The first was represented in ancient Rome by the reforms of the Gracchi brothers, and in Sparta by the reforms of Agis and Cleomenes, whose characteristic feature was the forced limitation of large landholding and the support of small landholding at its expense. The second was represented by the transition to Caesarism in Rome, and to oligarchic tyranny in the Greek poleis. Early Caesarism (the principate regime) can be regarded as the first historical example of a dictatorship of the Bonapartist type — a dictatorship resting on maneuvering between classes and social strata under conditions of an unstable balance between them. Caesarism led to the cessation, in ancient Rome, of the civil wars whose basis was conflict over the resolution of the agrarian question. There occurred a temporary easing of the severity of the problem of community members' dispossession of land, through granting veterans land in the conquered provinces and in the confiscated estates of political opponents, as well as through the establishment of colonies on conquered territories. By strengthening the political position of the nobility through the restriction of democracy, Caesarism at the same time strengthened the state apparatus's control over the nobility as well, ensuring the forced consolidation of the ruling class by limiting destructive internal conflicts and rivalry within it. However, over time an ever-growing number of community members lost their land, turning either into dependent tenant peasants (Roman coloni) or into lumpenized city dwellers (the "proletariat" of the ancient world, only part of which actually represented a resource of wage labor). The inevitable slowdown of external expansion limited the influx of slaves, hindered their unrestrained exploitation, and forced a softening of the forms of slave dependency ("slaves with huts" — slaves who were in fact recognized as having rights to movable and partly immovable property, including the use of a plot of land and the founding of a family).
All this meant a decline in the quality and efficiency of the labor force employed in agriculture, and led to the growth of parasitic, lumpenized strata living off handouts from the state and the aristocracy. The reduction in the number of independent peasant farms and the growth in the number of urban lumpen living on grain doles in kind meant an increase in the in-kind tax burden and a shrinking of the domestic market, which led to a decline in the marketability of estates. The diminishing possibilities of running a private economy based on extremely intensive exploitation of slave labor led to the decline of specialized production and to a transition from intensive, market-oriented estates (villas in ancient Rome) to more self-contained, multi-branch estates, which as a result were also of larger size (latifundia). Super-large latifundian landholding, amid renewed growing political instability, gives rise to the phenomenon of the precarium — conditional private landholding, in which substantial land plots with the farms located on them are handed over to noble persons for use in exchange for personal support.
For a time, the universal transition to autocratic regimes sharply weakened the scale of internal political conflicts and made it possible to slow the growth of internal socio-economic contradictions in ancient society. But the change in the form of government was unable to abolish these contradictions. The ancient world collapsed under the weight of the shrinking number of independent peasant farms, declining agricultural efficiency, growing state expenditures, and shrinking reliable military contingents, while also running up against the limits of expansion and a decline in the influx of slaves from outside. These processes were accompanied by a decline in the efficiency of the state apparatus, growing corruption, provincial separatism, a succession of coups, disruption of monetary circulation, a decline in morals, and a fall in the authority of the dominant religion... In the end, Carthage (under the pressure of Rome), the Greek poleis (under the pressure first of Macedon and then of Rome), and the Roman Empire itself all fell under the pressure of conquerors. In the Eastern Roman Empire, which withstood the blows of the "barbarians," the transition from the ancient mode of production to the new, feudal relations was not accompanied by such destructive consequences as in the rest of the ancient world. However, there too this transition required qualitative shifts in the dominant relations of production. On the concept of the "revolution of the slaves": In Stalinist "Marxism-Leninism," in complete contradiction with the historical facts, the fall of the ancient world was presented as the result of some fictitious "revolution of the slaves" (in the post-Stalin period this doctrine was revised, and the theoretical description of the revolutionary transition to feudalism was brought into greater conformity with the historical facts).
Slave revolts were undoubtedly a fact of the ancient world and accompanied its entire history from the moment when the disintegration of the economy of free community members and the expansion of the mass of slave labor employed reached a noticeable scale. However, since the slave class was not the product of a tendency toward the formation of a new, more progressive mode of production, and was not even the principal exploited class of ancient society, the "revolution of the slaves" could not have been the main factor in the social revolution that led to the transformation of ancient society into a feudal one. Slave revolts (just as in Asiatic society) never led to any substantial consequences in the system of socio-economic relations. Moreover, unlike Asiatic society, ancient society knows neither mass peasant uprisings nor successful uprisings of peasants together with slaves, if only because the social interests of slaves and free peasant-community members diverged sharply. The concept of the "revolution of the slaves" was created as a logical consequence of the concept of the "slaveholding mode of production," and rested on distorted notions about the class structure of ancient society and on an extreme oversimplification of the role of class struggle and the mechanisms of social revolution in history.
6.4.1. The Emergence of Feudalism
The social revolution that determined the transition to the feudal mode of production on the territory of the former Roman Empire (even within Byzantium) nowhere had the character of a direct transformation of Roman ancient orders into feudal ones. This process was mediated by the development, on the former territory of the ancient world, of a free community of a new type. The presence of a mass of free community members in Western Europe was determined by the barbarian conquest of the territory of the Western Roman Empire. Large-scale Roman landholding was undermined, and the proportion of personally dependent peasants (coloni) and slaves was substantially reduced. In Engels's phrase, between the Roman colonus and the medieval serf stands the free Frankish peasant. In Byzantium, the spread of the free community in the 7th–8th centuries CE was brought about by mass popular movements against large landholding, often appearing in the guise of religious heresies, as well as by large-scale Slavic colonization of the Balkans and, in part, of Asia Minor. All this led to a significant decline of large landholding (even to the point of the division of large estates among peasants), to the reduction or complete disappearance of the personally dependent peasantry, and to the restoration of the free community. Attention should be drawn to the fact that the Germanic (like the Slavic) community differs both from the ancient and from the Asiatic one. The Germanic community represents a further step along the path of the development of private economy. It is a union of independent private family farms, a union that exists only to perform certain common functions (defense against external enemies, clearing forest for arable land, and so on). Communal lands exist, but appear as the joint holding of private owners. This form of community contains a greater potential for the development of the private character of labor, and hence for participation in commodity economy.
The barbarian conquests on the territory of the Western Roman Empire led to the formation of feudal society insofar as a synthesis occurred of the preconditions for feudalism that had developed, on the one hand, in the late Roman Empire, and on the other, in the early-class social order of the tribes
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Часть 1 Chapter 6. The Economic Social Formation: The Asiatic, Ancient, and Feudal Modes of Production
Часть 2 - Chapter 6. The Economic Social Formation: The Asiatic, Ancient,
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